A Water Commons in Chile's Neoliberal Desert: Water Governance, Lithium Mining and Identity Formation in San Pedro de Atacama

Abstract

An oasis village in the world’s driest desert, San Pedro de Atacama’s customary system of communitarian irrigation water governance – a highly unique instance of commoning in neoliberal Chile – is a socio-culturally rooted institution that dates back multiple thousands of years. Today however, with the start of the global green energy transition and the subsequent boom of lithium extraction in the Atacama, the water institution is facing entirely new socio-environmental threats to its existence. Under the rationale of corporate social responsibility, and in the neoliberal context of state absence in terms of socio-environmental regulations, lithium company Albemarle engages with local Indigenous communities through an economic benefit-sharing agreement. The controversial, identity-criteriafocused model of resource distribution by which the agreement functions deepens and further problematizes existing social identity boundaries within the San Pedro society. The result is a situation of widespread internal conflict, marked by growing tensions within and among the Indigenous communities as well as between the communities and non-Indigenous identity groups. The implications for the overarching institution of communitarian water governance are detrimental. Induced by mounting disunity and enabled by the sudden influx of Albemarle’s lithium money, Indigenous communities increasingly assert their territorial autonomy by appropriating what they have come to see as ‘their’ part of the San Pedro River and ‘their’ share of its water. The result is a general de-collectivization of organization and hence the disruption of communitarian water governance. Indeed, San Pedro’s current – lithium-money-induced – socio-territorial disintegration implies the gradual un-commoning of its historical water commons. All in all, this research maps the political ecology of water, mining and identity in San Pedro de Atacama, tracking the linkages between a company-community benefit-sharing agreement, the subsequent instigation of socially disruptive processes of identity (re)formation and the resultant disruption of San Pedro de Atacama’s institution of communitarian water governance.